There are some tech-savvy humanities scholars, there are some who try to grok modern IT but don’t quite manage, and there are some who wish information technology had never progressed beyond the invention of the book (for the extremists, even the printing press was a step too far: bound manuscripts are the height of IT for these folks*). I recently had a conversation with an eminent Cambridge humanities professor who said to me, in the context of a longer conversation about information management, “It’s like when Windows [by which he meant Word] will run on Microsoft [by which he meant a PC running Windows] but won’t work on a Mac [by which he meant... who knows? Word and Windows will both run on Macs].”
This sort of comment bothers me for three reasons. One is that it is baldly nonsensical: one must interpret it – with little guidance except one’s own background knowledge and a few of the antagonist’s preceding slip-ups – in order to make sense of it. Another is that it shows a lack of concern about accuracy; a dangerous lack of concern, in fact, for someone who has responsibility for one of Cambridge’s extensive, unique, and breathtakingly expensive digital datasets (furthermore, the scholarly accuracy of the input to the system matters little if your data is being corrupted by both its storage and its delivery mechanisms, which it was being). The third reason, which is the one of greatest personal concern to me, is that somebody like this – and he really is a brilliant scholar – might not be able to use Interpreader. Without people like that using Interpreader, or something like it, the paradigm of keeping annotations private and interpretations informal will remain among at least some of the best (in a traditional sense) scholars. That is not what I want.
My usability hat just swivelled itself onto my head a little more firmly.
* I’ve nothing against bound manuscripts per se, but they are not an efficient means of mass-communication.